Outcha, Russell Beattie‘s website was seriously hacked. Have a look at his story, good reminder for all of us (back-up, security)….

Okay, so how did the guy get in? No idea. The logs were gone. My best guess is a PHP CLI script I had running which allowed a Flash IRC app to re-route through my server to the freenode IRC servers. It was probably running as root and hackable as hell. I’ve also been playing with Apache and PHP 5 lately, so that was running on port 8080, and I really hadn’t made any effort to secure it. Or it could have been any number of exploits out there that I never bothered to patch, or it could’ve been a bad password. We’ll never know. Whatever it was, it was my fault for not maintaining my site better. Hopefully this new setup is more secure, enough to deter another attack for a while at least.

Okay, lessons: back up your data, NOW. I backed up my server last month, but the files were incomplete and a freakin’ mess. So don’t just back up, do it cleanly and in an organized, easy-to-find manner. Secondly, re-check your security. I’ve got a few more things to clean up and harden myself and I’ve been banging at the server all weekend.

Rodrigo posted a book’s review of Jim Collins. I find Jim’s ideas very valuable and I already published some abstracts about his work in my Corporate Entrepreneurship section (9 to 14).

Have also a look at Jim Collins’ website (no blog yet as far as I know).

[via Dilbert]

It sounds quite familiar :-)

After the 60th anniversary of the D-Day (I posted about that on 5th of June 2004), the World is marking the anniversary of the death camp liberation of Auschwitz these days.

Do not forget our duty of memory, specially for our children.

Lest we forget that…

…about 6 million Jews were systematically murdered, 1.5 million of these were children. This represents 2/3rds of the European Jews and about 1/3rd of the worldwide Jewish community at this time. 6 million people, it’s about the current population of Austria or Switzerland, annihilated in 6 years, 1.5 million children. One and a half million children were killed. God….

A concentration camp survivor wipes a tear during a ceremony at the former death camp Auschwitz Birkenau. World leaders and elderly survivors of the Nazi death camp Auschwitz gathered in Poland on Thursday to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation by Soviet troops and remember the victims of the Holocaust.

[via Reuters]

[via Seth]

I couldn’t believe it was not a joke. Incredible, this is *so* ridiculous! As Seth says, the most important question is:

Who, exactly, makes the little tiny gloves?

OKLAHOMA CITY — With cockfighting now banned in Oklahoma, one legislator is proposing a blood-free alternative: fitting roosters with little boxing gloves and letting them slug it out.

“Who’s going to object to chickens fighting like humans do? Everybody wins,” said Democratic state Sen. Frank Shurden, a protector of the gamefowl industry and a longtime defender of cockfighting, in which birds are fitted with razor-like spurs and often battle to the death.

Oklahoma voters banned cockfighting in 2002. The practice is still legal in Louisiana and New Mexico.

“To me it answers everything. It saves the industry, takes blood sport out and generates revenue for Oklahoma,” Shurden said.

Janet Halliburton, a lawyer who led the drive to ban cockfighting, dismissed Shurden’s idea as the first step in a scheme to bring back the sport.

[via BetaNews]

Following news that lead Firefox engineer Ben Goodger has been hired by Google, fellow Mozilla developer Darin Fisher has announced that he, too, has joined the search giant. With at least two high-profile browser developers under its belt, rumors have begun swirling about Google’s future plans with the Mozilla platform.

Knowledge@Wharton released an article about typical CEOs background, education and carriers, based on a comparison which compares the "typical" executives in the 80s and in 2001. Quite interesting to observe the shifts in a lot of fields.

Today’s executives are younger, more likely to be female, and less likely to have Ivy League educations. They make their way to the executive suite faster than ever before about four years faster than their counterparts in 1980), and they hold fewer jobs along the way. They spend about five years less in their current organization before being promoted, and are more likely to be hired from the outside. What’s more, the Organization Man, the lifelong corporate employee who worked his way faithfully and slowly up the executive ladder, appears to be headed out the door — increasingly nudged, apparently, by women.

The dates for the coming U2’s Vertigo Tour are online since 3 days. I will try to get some tickets for Zürich on 11th July 2005.

‘VERTIGO//2005’ WORLD TOUR – EXCLUSIVE!

The dates, cities, venues and ticket information on the tour we’ve all been waiting for!

U2 will begin the first leg of their Vertigo//2005 world tour in San Diego on March, 28th 2005.

Vertigo//2005 will visit 13 cities in North America before arriving in Brussels on June 10th for the first of 24 scheduled European performances, finishing up in Lisbon in the middle of August.

[Thx Patrick]

I was yesterday in St.Gallen – Switzerland at our Headquarters. Quite snowy, more than 40 cm in town :-)